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* Roosevelt spent the rest of his life advertising his dashing role. But the generals and ayatollahs were probably much more important than the Americans. There were several conspiracies: it was Zahedi’s troops who seized power and Ayatollah Kashani’s crowds that ruled the streets. Roosevelt did recruit some criminals, but it is unlikely that their crowd of gangsters and prostitutes were decisive and even by his own account he scarcely spent his own budget. Indeed he gave Zahedi the remaining $900,000 of Ajax funds. Eisenhower remarked that the CIA man’s report ‘seemed more like a dime novel than historical fact’. The preposterous self-promoter was the novelist. Yet the coup became an iconic crime of American imperialism, its myth encouraged by both the CIA, to boost the mystique of its power, and the shah’s enemies, Iranian nationalists and the Islamic republic, to demonize and taint the Pahlavis. When the shah heard Roosevelt’s vainglorious claims, he just laughed, a scene recounted in the diaries of his court minister Asadollah Alam.

* Ho’s paternal charm belied his Stalinist ferocity. Rivals were quietly executed: ‘All those who don’t follow the line I’ve laid down will be broken.’ In North Vietnam, 200,000 innocent well-off peasants were executed by quota, laid down in May 1953 – ‘fixed in principle at the ratio of one per one thousand people of the total population’.

* In 1957, Paris handed over Morocco to Sultan Muhammad Alawi descendant of the terrifying seventeenth-century monarch Ismail ibn Sharif. Muhammad had resisted Vichy demands to send Moroccan Jews to the death camps, then after the war had demanded the reuniting of Morocco and independence. Paris exiled him to Madagascar. Now he and his son Hassan negotiated the French and Spanish exit from Morocco. As king in 1961, Hassan promoted the dynasty as sherifians, assuming the title Amir al-Muminin, and assuming absolute power while allowing a multi-party parliament. Able, haughty and ruthless, he crushed opposition, often with French help, seized Western Sahara and succeeded in making Morocco a stable hybrid monarchy.

* De Gaulle’s ‘politics of grandeur’ reflected his personality and life. ‘Of course I wouldn’t redo the Second Empire,’ he reflected, ‘because I’m not Napoleon’s nephew and one doesn’t become emperor at my age.’ His view of life was one of struggle: ‘Life is a combat and each of its phases includes both successes and failures … Success contains within it the germs of failure and vice versa.’ His view of humanity was low: ‘There are only two motors to human action, fear and vanity. Either there’s a state of catastrophe and fear dominates. Or calm and then it is vanity.’ De Gaulle won a plebiscite that approved his Fifth Republic, creating a powerful presidency like a republican monarch, successor to the Bourbons and Bonapartes. When he met the young British queen Elizabeth II, she asked his advice and he perfectly defined constitutional monarchy for her: ‘In the place where God has placed you, be who you are, Madam. I mean be that person around whom, thanks to your legitimacy, everything in your kingdom is organized, around whom your people see their patrie and whose presence and dignity contribute to national unity.’

* In 1966, in tiny, oil-rich Gabon – part of France’s central colonial federation, Afrique-Équatoriale française – de Gaulle interviewed a dapper, diminutive ex-officer who spoke beautiful French, Albert-Bernard Bongo. At just thirty, de Gaulle blessed him as vice-president and then backed him as president, in return for favoured access to Gabonese oil and uranium. Bongo, who later converted to Islam, ruled like a monarch for forty-two years, enriched by oil and French subsidies, intimate with every French president up to Sarkozy. His many children were promoted to government. In 1980, his daughter Pascaline had an affair with Bob Marley, the Jamaican Rastafarian singer whom she invited to play in Gabon; later she was promoted to foreign minister. When Bongo died in 2009, his son Ali Bongo succeeded him. The Bongos ruled for over fifty years.